Archive for November 2014 (4 posts)

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From the Catbird Seat is excited to launch a new monthly series, “Teacher’s Corner,” by Rebecca Newland, Teacher in Residence at the Library of Congress. “Teacher’s Corner” will highlight ways that K-12 teachers and librarians can effectively use poetry- and literature-related primary sources from the Library in the classroom.

Bringing primary sources into the poetry and literature classroom and library is one way to foster student engagement, develop critical thinking skills, and build content knowledge. My goal in this blog series is to offer teaching suggestions connected to specific writers and their work using rich materials from the Library’s collections.

Not everyone who writes poetry calls themselves a poet. Sometimes people who are well known for a vastly different area of expertise–such as politics, activism, or science–write poetry for pleasure. Students may be surprised by these poems from historical figures.

Abraham Lincoln, “My Childhood-Home I See Again” (1846), p. 2. From the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress.

Ask:

What can we learn about Lincoln from the poem?

Does the poem reveal anything surprising about Lincoln?

Can the content of the poem be connected to events in Lincoln’s life?

Helen Keller is most famous for overcoming blindness, deafness, and the inability to speak to become a political activist and lecturer, but she was also a prolific writer. Offer the poem “Autumn” without revealing its author. Ask students to focus in particular on the poem’s visual imagery. Suggest investigating Keller’s connection to Alexander Graham Bell as an entry point to find out more about her work and activism.

The following guest post is by Amber Paranick, a librarian in the Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room. I got the idea for this post by quite literally stumbling on it. I was running to catch my bus and tripped and almost fell. I looked down at my feet and much to my admiration was […]

The following guest post is by Yvonne French, webmaster for the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. I enjoy poetry readings as much as the next English major, but I relish poetry lectures–so when I found out former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia was going to talk about “Poetry […]

The following is a guest post by Megan Armenti, Specialist, Congressional Research Service. When I first met my husband and From the Catbird Seat blogger–Peter Armenti–I was immediately drawn in by his sincere smile, warm personality, and quintessential shy librarian nature. I soon discovered that he held a deep-seated love for poetry, one that I didn’t fully […]

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